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Boulcott Hospital - sponsored content

Since introducing the concept of the Boulcott Joint Replacement Centre, the number of joint replacement patients has increased significantly, says the hospital's managing director Richard Grenfell.

"For us that's a great sign - you need to have the theatres right, the nursing staff and theatre staff right to look after patients with this type of surgery, so we've definitely got the right formula."

Seven orthopaedic surgeons specialising in hips, knees, shoulders, hands and ankles, work out of the Lower Hutt centre, which attracts patients from the greater Wellington region, including the Hutt Valley, Kapiti, the Wairarapa and Wellington city.

To date feedback has been nothing but positive, says Dr Grenfell, who also works as an anaesthetist at Boulcott. "We get patients who come here who are delighted with the quality of service, the standard of care, the food, and their rooms.

"In our patient survey forms, frequent comments are that it's the best hospital they've been in, they often compare us with other hospitals and we get told we're the best, which is always good to hear."

Those comments don't surprise Dr Grenfell though - he says Boulcott Hospital's point of difference is the quality of its service.

He backs that up with results from its first ever EQuIP (Evaluation and Quality Improvement Programme) quality assessment.

Conducted by Telarc Quality Health using Australasian standards, Boulcott received four times more extensive achievement ratings than any of the other 50 DHB and private hospitals surveyed around the country.

"It is the extraordinarily good staff who drive our top results - excellence starts from the staff and goes all the way to the management, there is a strong culture of striving for excellence right through every facet of our organisation."

Boulcott Hospital's comprehensive facilities mean patients can access a range of services all on one site.There's a radiology unit, a specialist centre housing more than 40 consultants, three operating theatres, a fully equipped endoscopy suite, a day surgery suite, and 29 in-patient beds.

Not to mention the latest addition, the Boulcott Eye Centre which will be home to three eye surgeons come September.

"One of our theatres is an integrated theatre, which was the first of its kind in Wellington - all the equipment in it is electronically connected to a central computer so images can be stored, they can be viewed on a number of screens in the theatre and they can be transmitted further afield."

The actual premises have undergone three major expansions too, the most recent being a new building that houses a new day ward, the third operating theatre and additional in-patient beds.

"The hospital has certainly evolved, I'm proud of the quality of our surgeons, the quality of our care and of our service - at the end of the day quality is what is important and we are certainly getting that right."